S4:E4 Business Systems & AI for Time-Poor Owners with Allan Dib

If you're a little bit geeky, there's like a terminal mode.

Yep.

And terminal mode is for developers. The cool feature of it is it basically sucks up any files you have in a directory and you can do stuff with them.

Welcome to the System Hub Podcast.

Hola.

Konnichiwa. Guten Tag. Where we interview world-class experts. You have to have a lot of passion for what you're doing. I was fanatical in my 20s. If you could find a way to produce a business that works without you, your life would change like that. Extracting, organizing, and optimizing. Optimizing their best systems and processes for rapid business growth. Now let's get into the show. Alan, mate, good to catch up and sit down and record one of our many conversations.

Yeah, yeah, we, I feel like we have a lot of conversations and a lot of good ones, but we don't record enough of them. So many times I'm like, damn it, I wish we'd hit record. I was at, we were, we both recently ran IRL real life events for clients and we both had a pretty good time. You spoke at my event, I spoke at your event. And it got me thinking the value of real life in-person events now with AI. It feels like everything went digital, everything went online, and now it feels like a lot of the value, especially for high ticket stuff, is moving to real life, to moving into in-person stuff. What are your thoughts, man?

Yeah, I definitely felt after COVID, because everybody went online and they were doing all Zoom meetings and everybody got Zoom fatigue. And then I remember straight after COVID when all of the lockdowns got lifted here in Melbourne, everybody was hungry for a live event. So it's almost like they got it all out of their system and then it was a little bit of a lull and we've bridged over that point now. And I think you're right. I think the connection that you've had or that you get, we've not run an event for probably about 6 years before the last live event and this one to shake hands with clients, to catch up with colleagues, to organize something. Something magical happens not only in the room, but in the lead-up to the event. And then it's just post the event. There's a buzz in our business. Everybody's excited. Something's happening. And straight after the event, my, one of my team members is like, when are we running the next one?

Yeah. Yeah. So you're like, give me a knife.

I was, I said, can we run it every 2 years?

The thing I think is that obviously you get to see people in person and all of that, but I think it's a big competitive advantage because especially after COVID, there are so many businesses that said, ah, this is great. We're just going to do everything online. They used to be in-person events. They used to run in-person things and now they love the ease and frictionlessness that comes with just doing everything online. And so now I think it's a competitive advantage of having real-world in-person experiences. And I'm seeing more and more people who ahead of the curve are like really prioritizing community in real life rather than just online. Because you're right, like the Zoom fatigue sets in. I don't need another Zoom meeting, even if it's really cool people and people I want to connect with. Yeah, I might do it, but it's definitely not going to be the same as us being over dinner, chatting, having a coffee, listening to speakers, shaking hands, and being there in the room.

It was amazing to see even some of the big names, whether or not it's right or wrong, because I think going back to live is important. But you look at someone like Tony Robbins, and he was doing the stuff with Dean Graziosi, and they started doing some live events— and they're, sorry, digital events— and they're very large scale. I'd be curious to know if they bridge back to real life. Tony still does, I think, a few of his UPWs. Who knows for how much longer he's going to do that, or if he's just said, you know what, this business models more efficient. But I think that creates the opening, like you want to be zigging when others are zagging.

Yeah, totally.

I'm curious because you'd obviously got some discussion internally about running— you've got your mastermind and you're looking to run regular events. What's your thinking behind that, to build on what you said? And how often are you going to have these touch points? What's your vision for the live events?

Yeah, I think a real big part of why people stay for a long time in a community is for the community aspects, or in a coaching program. So I think of coaching as 3 things. There's like the information, and that's the least valuable part. Once you've got the information, it's all right, I've got the knowledge, I've got the— I know how to do the thing. I don't really need to stick around with the coach for a long time. Then there's the thing that's less obvious, and it's the negative information. It's don't waste your time on this stuff. This is going to send you into 10 different directions. It's taking the knife out of the toddler's hand, right? You don't hurt yourself in all of these different directions. Then there's the kick up the pants, the motivation, it's the accountability, and that's, that is super valuable. But I think what's really undervalued is the peer connections within the community. Like being with a group that's on the same journey as you. So other entrepreneurs who are going through the same struggles, like we had our mastermind in Melbourne. We had a group of maybe 20 of our top clients that are local to Australia. And people were talking about how do I hire this person? How do I, what do I do about this person that's underperforming? Should I prioritize 'Why would you prioritize this type of marketing versus that?' And having some of those discussions in the room, not just me and the team teaching, but everyone sharing experiences because people were from different industries. We had a guy who's a top gun in the jewelry industry, and then we had another person who's an international tax expert, and we had you come and speak to the group as well. And everyone just walked away with so much value, not just from me and the team and Anna, but, and I would think actually that wasn't even the highlight of it. It's them having that peer connection and discussing what's working for them, because I've always gotten massive value from being in peer groups and seeing, ah, look what he's doing, look what she's doing. If they can do it, I can do it.

Yeah, I definitely find in coaching and education businesses you want to be thinking about how do you get people to stick, because the hardest work obviously is getting a new client, then you want to keep them recurring. I think And another one in our sort of peer group, Dale Beaumont, is a great example. In his community, like, he's had people who will sit in there for 10 years and they come for community and they go on travel trips with him around the world and creates that bond. And people have moved beyond just, I'm coming here for the education. They get the education bit. It's funny, I think about this quite a lot and I think about it for our business as well. The direction we ended up going is thinking in terms of software. So we try and build in a piece of software that becomes part of the way someone does business. And then the additional bits, the community, the training, they're like the bonus bits. But really what gets them to stick, well, this is how we do things here and that's why we remain subscribed. But I think everybody, anybody listening to this should be thinking, about their business and saying, how do I get clients to stick with me longer and to buy more and to be upsold into other programs?

The other critical point is, yes, it's great when clients stick and they buy more from me and they stay for a long time and there's high LTV, but, or lifetime value. But the other part of it is if they stick, they're going to get a better result. There's nothing worse than seeing a client who's in and out and they're like, I didn't get a result or I didn't get the result I was expecting. And let's face it, with most things in life, whether it's fitness, whether it's wealth, whether it's marketing, whether it's business systems, whether it's whatever, there's a compounding interest that comes with sticking it out, doing the routine thing, making sure that you're doing the right stuff at the right time for an ongoing period of time. So you're not going to go from overweight to six-pack abs in a month, right?

Yeah.

So you need to stick to a nutrition plan for a good amount of time. You need to stick to an exercise plan for a good amount of time. And yes, as a As a fitness instructor, I love high lifetime value clients sticking around for a long time, but if they do, they're going to get the actual result that they want and they're going to have an amazing experience as a result. So that to me is like really central to the lifetime value discussion around, yes, I want for selfish purposes because I want high lifetime value, but more than that, I want them to have the stories and experiences. And from that is going to come referrals, goodwill, all sorts of good stuff.

Which I feel that is the North Star for business. Clients come to you with a problem that they want solved, and you're making a promise as a business owner that, yes, we can do this and we can deliver this outcome for you. And then you want to do everything in your power to do that, because then you get the referrals, you get the repeat business, you get the great case studies. That's been a big secret to our success, is finding those case studies and telling those stories and working with them. It's hard though. Both of us have business owners as our target audience who are time poor, oftentimes very ADHD, like their attention is getting pulled as everybody's is every which way. What are some ways that you think about getting the attention of those business owners, holding it long enough to get them the result that they actually came to you for?

Yeah. So the way me and my team have thought about this over time has shifted a little bit. And because there is that balance between someone signing up and then not getting an immediate result and feeling disappointed or whatever. So we do have some strategies that help people get quick wins. So we want to, we want in the first 90 days for you to feel really validated. You made a good decision. Here's a few quick wins. Here's some strategies you can deploy immediately to get some nice results. But we want you to look at the long-term view also. So there are things— so we start to map out sprints around here are the 2 or 3 big priorities that are going to take maybe a year to get a good return on. And they're important. Like, we're building for the long term. We're not here to do a few quick tricks, a few little things, and then goodbye, right? We want to make sure that we build a solid foundation. We want to build the right marketing systems, we want to build all the right processes, the right team, the right assets. That's just going to take time. You know, that phrase like you can't make a baby in one month by getting 9 women pregnant, right? It's just going to take 9 months, right? And exactly the same from a marketing infrastructure point of view. For sure, we can get some quick wins. There's always some low-hanging fruit that we can implement, but if you're going to build a proper marketing infrastructure, we need the right people, we need the right assets, we need the right team. We're going to— and especially if you don't have much starting off, you start— need to start building some of that. So a lot of that is about that balancing act between now and later.

I know we've had this discussion a few times when we've gone walking and I'm thinking about our business and how we deliver the dream outcome for the client. One thing's always been we help the business owner identify a systems champion, someone in their business who then continually drives it forward. You guys do the same. With helping people recruit and place the marketing coordinator who makes sure that it actually gets done because the business owner is short on time and oftentimes doesn't get the work done that needs to be done. One thing that you said to me, which I'm now actually thinking we're going to try in the new year, it's probably time for me to get back on the tools potentially and work with some business owners one-on-one to really just see what it's like in this new world with all of the tools we have available with AI to just do it for them. Yeah, like, I'm curious to know if we can make that bold promise to the business owner that we will create time for you, we will get you to the point where your business gives you true freedom. And if my team and I focused on that for a small handful of people, and then I think that's going to give us a chance to go deep to find out where are those leverage points? How do you make it stick? How do you make sure it gets done? You already do that with a lot of your one-on-one work. So I don't know if you've got any.

Yeah. So that was a big unlock for us early on. Like any coaches, we would encourage people to do the right stuff, right? It would be like we get on a call, we'd agree on a strategy and then let the client go execute. We come back in a week. How'd you go? Didn't have time. I had this fire I had to put out, whatever. Oh yeah. All right. No worries. Next week the coach gets on. Still hasn't done it. So it's very common in coaching. And the thing that I recognized is we're trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Like an entrepreneur is usually the vision, to use Traction language, there's visionaries and there's integrators, right? And they're usually the visionaries, meaning they have 10 ideas every minute. I'm like that. They'll try something once, twice, three times, get bored of it. There'll be some other bright, shiny object they follow. And that's actually a gift that you need those people in the business. They're the risk-tolerant people. They're the people who want to try things to innovate, all that sort of stuff. But you need the people who are just going to drive the bus every day, who are just going to do the checking the box, doing the process, showing up every day, doing the same thing, getting the compound interest. And that's not them. Yeah, we had never ever envisioned being— doing recruitment for, on behalf of clients, but we ended up doing that because that was a big unlock. So we figured like, all right, the business owner, they're never going to get a good result if we're trying to fit this square peg in a round hole. So we'll help them recruit that marketing coordinator and then get it, get the stuff off their plate. So someone is doing those daily, weekly, monthly processes. And it's getting done. And it was a huge unlock. Like I was just on a call yesterday with a bunch of our clients and they were like, oh man, I can't believe I didn't do this earlier. And so it's just—

As the business owner, really, that is the secret. You need to empower the team around you to get the work done. Figure out what the most important work is. Generating leads, converting those leads, developing systems that drive the business. Figure out what that is and then get someone sitting in those seats.

And importantly, you do your work in your genius zone. So if you're an artist, do the art. If you're an expert at AI or whatever, do the stuff that's in your genius zone and get all the other stuff off your plate. Like in school, we get taught you've just, you've got to have all the answers. You do the test and if you don't have all the answers, you're dumb and you fail. Whereas in business, it's completely opposite. If you don't know the answers, we hire people to do the answers. In school, you'd get expelled for hiring someone who does the answers for you, right? So, yeah, counterintuitive. So we need to make sure that we've got people who are covering our weaknesses in the business.

I like the idea of breaking this podcast into segments.

Okay.

So I feel like this is a new segment change.

All right.

And the segment that I wanted to also cover, like, if we start off, I think, introducing and talking about what's going on, I think then exploring some AI news. I feel like this is an area that constantly comes up as we're going walking. New tools are getting released every single day. Models are getting updated every couple of weeks. The speed at which this is moving is extraordinary. And every time I'm looking at, I'm going, oh, that's a cool tool. Oh, that's a cool tool. Oh, I'd love to get your take on, yeah, anything that's bubbling up for you in the AI space.

So something I've been obsessed with lately, and you got me onto it initially, but I think I took it to the next level is Claude code, right? Claude and ChatGPT and all of that. They're great models and they work well. There's like the web browser normie mode, but then if you're a little bit geeky, there's like a terminal mode and terminal mode is for developers. And what the cool feature of it is, it basically sucks up all any files you have in a directory and you can do stuff with them. Now, normally that's for software developers. They'll have a bunch of directories with, or folders with computer code and they'll write software and stuff like that, but you can use it for other stuff. So I started, so I've kept like over the last 5 years every blood test and every medical exam I've ever done. I've got copies of all my writing, my books, my email newsletters, things like that. I've got legal documents and things like that. So I've started to create a folder called AI context. So there's a, there's context about me in every way, shape, or form about what I'm doing from a legal perspective, from an accounting perspective, from my goals, my height, my weight, my diet, my— literally everything about me. And then the AI can take that as context and run any queries I want. So like the other day, I uploaded like 165 different blood tests, and I said, well, show me what are some of the trends, what are your diagnosis, and then what are your recommendations? And it went through, probably took about 10 minutes to suck through all the PDF files. There were scans, there were things like that, and it was scarily accurate. It's like, it started— oh, you started here, your levels went up, so you must have done that treatment. And it got— it guessed what treatment I was having for certain things. And then it said, you've done really well, you used to be at 22% body fat, you're now down to 11%, you've increased muscle, all of this sort of stuff. And it basically looked through all the different markers. It's your kidney function looks pretty good, but it's been a little bit elevated on the last couple of blood tests and all of this. I recommend you watch this. And it was super comprehensive. So impressive.

I think if we get started on Claude Code, there is a chance that this will be a 5-hour episode. I love this tool. Yes. Shout out to Mike Rhodes, who he spotted this a couple of months ago or even a few months. And he said, Dave, you got to get on this. And I resisted a little while because it felt a little bit outside of my comfort zone, like you said. But once you get into it, it is extraordinarily powerful because it— you install it locally on your terminal, which means it can do things on your computer. It can create files and folders and move things around. And the context window that it can take an amount of data in on is so much larger than when you're working with the web interface. And then it will crawl and index all of that content, and then it saves it in a little file. That means anytime the— you're using Claude Code, it reads that file first and it basically tells it where everything is and all of the key things. And like you said, it's all about context engineering. And that's all I think about with my System Hub sort of background. We see that as a collection of all of the context. Writing styles, personality tests, org charts, policies, staff handbook, goals for the business. Like, everything I'm storing in this file. And then it really just— you need to build up the habit. It's a muscle of just having that as your default place to go to ask a question and get an answer.

Yeah.

And then it goes the step beyond just the answer, you can then get it building stuff.

Yeah.

And building agents. So I built out this cool little agent that would help me script up YouTube videos, and I worked with it over the course of a couple of days, and I was fed it a lot of source material, and then I got it to develop these different phases where it does some thinking and has a look at the topic and sees what's already performing well, and then has a discussion with me to go, okay, this is the angle we want to go, digs a bit deeper, then thinks about what the hooks and the structure and everything might be. And it takes a few minutes to go through, but it will then spit out a fantastic first draft of a script that's so close to the money for what I want to record. And I save this as an agent inside my Claude Code, which then means as I build out numerous different agents, Claude Code is smart enough when I ask it to do something to look if it's got an agent that I've already pre-programmed to do something, and then it'll go, 'Oh, calling upon the title tags and descriptions agent that you've already written. And now I'm going to draft this out for you.' And then the step— peeking into the future here— I'm getting more and more comfortable then trying to design little apps because I've built out these agents now that can do a range of things in the business. Then you put a nice little interface over the top where now you start vibe coding little solutions, internal tools that are easy for the team to use because some of them, they'll get a bit scared off with Claude Code and using the terminal. But if I make a nice little interface, it's all driven off the back end of this. And another one I'm just starting to play around with is these MCP servers. With Claude Code, you can hook other services in. So we ended up setting up an n8n, which is like an automation open source tool that you install on your own server to do a bunch of activities for you. Independently. They just run. But you connect that now through an MCP server to Claude Code. So you can then say, Claude Code, I want you to look at this agent. Now I want you to design the workflow that does this and this step and build it out in my N8n, and then I'll have a little bit of a look at it. And then you can start to build these things that have N8n underneath as the engine to actually do the tasks. Autonomously or on a particular cadence. Because at the moment when I'm doing most of my things in Claude Code, I have to ask it to do it. I'm like, I want you to do this thing. But there are certain things in business that just should be happening on a regular cadence. And with these tools coming together now, and I'm not a programmer and you just talk to it in natural language, I'm super pumped by Claude Code.

Me too. Similar to you, I've started to use code for actual coding. And I'm not, I'm not a coder by any stretch of the imagination. I know a little bit from very way back.

Yeah.

But I'm starting with my annoyances. So like the other day, I'm like, I've got to upload this big video file to Google Drive, wait for it to upload. Then when it's uploaded, I've got to share it out, copy the link, send it to the person or whatever. And I'm like, this is annoying that I'd have to wait. So I'm like, maybe I could code a little tool that will just upload it. And when it's uploaded, it'll, text me or send me an email with the link already shared out, ready to go. And within 10 minutes I had that thing coded. So now I just drop the file into a Google Drive and when it's uploaded, it'll ping me and say, here you go, here's the link. And just share out that link. Very cool. And I built another tool where like I had like heaps of saved Instagram Reels and TikTok videos where there's a cool idea or something interesting or something funny or whatever. And like I ended up with a folder of a thousand of them. I'm like, what am I going to do manually go through all these thousand things. So I built a little tool where it transcribes them, puts the transcription in with the file, and then renames the file to the summary of what that's about. So by the file name, I know exactly what that's about. And then I've got to, I can click into the transcription and just see, okay, yeah, that's something I'm going to use for this, that, or the other, or just delete it or whatever. So just starting with little annoyances that you've got or little problems that you want to solve that are not massive, they're not world-changing. You don't have to build a CRM system or something huge, but there's this little annoyance or this little process or this little thing that just takes half an hour of your time or whatever, 10 times a week or something like that. I think that's going to be really powerful. But we're kind of a little bit geeky.

For the non-geeks—

Speak for yourself, Alan. For the non-geeks, what do they do about this?

Look, the one thing and the reason you might look at something like Claude Code. What I like about it compared to some of the other tools is that it plans out first and then it can do a series of activities one after the other and it does it on its own. So that's why I like Claude Code. I don't have to sit there and tell it, oh, do this. It plans it out and then it does it. I get it though. It does feel a little bit of a stretch. When I'm working with my clients, I don't say start with Claude Code. What I say is, are you on Microsoft or are you on Google. Yeah. Oh, okay, you're on Google. You've got to start to learn all of the AI tools built into Google's platform. They're already there, they're already really powerful.

They're actually very good. Gemini is excellent, and most people are not using it at all.

It's— Gemini has this little cool feature called Gemini Gems which works just— ChatGPT's got their little custom GPTs, but the benefit of doing it in Google is their data security. They've already got access to all of your data. And what I love about Google is over time, it's like they play this game of just getting 1% better, 1% better. They'll make a little tweak here. Like, I was like, ah, because we moved our whole team onto G-Space. We were using things like Slack and we were using Zoom, and we just said, you know what, let's go all in on Google. We set up the Google Meet and we're using Google Chat. And there's little annoyances where I'm like, oh, I wish I could start a message thread on an individual. I can do it in the group chats, but I can't seem to do it. And then I get a little notice today saying we've now added this feature in. Like, they just constantly 1% better tweaks here and there, and everything's really integrated where you've got the little Gemini star in all of the different tools that you can press. And it's not quite there yet, but it's getting smarter to be able to link stuff together where you'll say, check my calendar for this. Can you create this Google Doc here? Can you copy this over here? And that's why we just thought we're using it anyway. So that's generally what I say to a client. What tools are you already using? And let's make sure that you're maximizing those.

And if you're on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, you're already probably paying for either Microsoft Copilot or whatever they call it. And then Google Gemini. Yeah.

Yeah, I feel like that's a great place to get started. Look, just about every tool, software that is coming out now, or that is out there, thinking, what is my AI play? So a lot of these new tools and existing tools are adding AI in. So that's the other thing you'd be thinking is, what tools am I already using that I'm already paying for that already have some sort of AI that's being built in? I just saw a little sneak peek preview of Xero has a new accounting software. They've got a new AI that's getting built in there like a chatbot that has full visibility into all of your financials. I think it's called JAX or something like Just Ask Xero. And it's incredible. Like you go to it with your natural language saying, ah, I want to get a loan for a car. Can you run the analysis and tell me if you think it's a good idea and what what sort of price point I should be looking at and things like that. And it starts to bridge that gap between just having the numbers but then actually getting meaningful output from it. And this is the start. So I think that's probably the other suggestion I've got for most business owners, which is what are you already using that has AI that you're just not using to its full potential?

Yeah.

With your clients, how— because I know you've gone all in on it. You've got Anna from your team shared with me some of the custom GPTs that you guys are building and they're extraordinary.

So we've built custom GPTs, but we've gone further. We've now spent a lot of money developing what we call Lean Intelligence. It's where our clients can go through, it builds their email copy, landing pages, things like that. And it's scarily good because we've got all of that context. We've got all the frameworks. So if you go into just ChatGPT or one of the tools and say, hey, give me a, give me email copy for a 5-email sequence. It's gonna spit out pretty crappy copy. It's gonna be generic. It's gonna sound hypey and all of that. So we've got the frameworks that are built on tons of training data, but also it's gonna be very custom to you because we base it on client interviews and things that you've done with your clients. And then we get, we get all of that data. We get all of the frameworks and then it's gonna build the stuff that's gonna be super, super good for you. So we're building a tool because that's really gonna be the differentiation. Everyone's gonna have access, pretty much everyone does have access to all these large language models. So everyone's coming out with stuff that sounds the same. And so to sound different, you've gotta capture your voice and you capture your context. So frameworks. Think plus context plus these tools is a superpower. But if you're just using these tools and giving them kind of garbage in, you're going to get garbage out.

Yeah, I think that's a big takeaway for anyone listening to this right now. If you haven't already, you need to start building your business context right now. That's the way I think about what System Hub is now. It's a place to store context. You just need to be thinking about all those assets that we talked about— avatar, thinking about all of client case studies, your vision, your mission, how you do what you do. It's collating all of that because that's— you need to be able to port that around to the different AI tools that you're using because the context, that's the game changer.

It's exactly the same as if, imagine you hired an expert business consultant, right? And he came into your business and you were trying to solve a particular problem and be like, all right, cool, let's pull out your financial statements. Let's have a look at your profit and loss. Let's have a look at who's your ideal client. Let's have a look what you're doing from a marketing perspective. Show me your website. They would need a lot of context to get to understand what you're doing in the business. What are your goals? Okay, you want to double in revenue? Okay, great. What markets are you operating? So you would normally do that all manually and then collate it for that particular situation. But now we all have access to Einstein-level reasoning, right? So having that in a really easy to access location, and I would say beyond just your business, even for your personal stuff, like I'm doing it for my personal stuff. Like I said, I'm doing it with my health. I'm doing it with my diet. I'm doing it with, or anything that I, my personal goals, what are the things I want to achieve? And it just gives such better results. And sometimes it just, I don't even remember that I gave it that context and it'll spit out, it'll say, oh, based on the thing that you mentioned, I don't know, last week or whatever, I would change this way and that way. So the context makes such a difference to the quality of the output.

There's a program I went through, must have been near the start of this year, by Rich Sheffrin, and he called it Zenith Mind. And it was, it goes deep on you as an individual and basically doing a whole bunch of different personality tests and then coming up with your results, let's say, almost like your DiSC profile and your Kolbe, because the AI has a lot of context around these personality tests. So you go deep on understanding you and then getting that output, and then that becomes a personality profile that I then feed to the AI. So when I was hiring my last EA, I went through the process of saying, you know everything about me. Yeah, here are the candidates that I'm looking at. You need to find people that are going to be able to fill in areas where I'm weak and make sure that, you know, that they're going to be a great EA for me. And the ability for it to cut through the noise— and I started feeding it transcripts of the interviews I was having with them and then getting it to give me a recommendation on which it thought was the best candidate, which I run alongside and parallel to me. I just see it as a thinking partner, so it helps to reinforce what I'm thinking and then cuts through, but it's, that was from me on an individual level. I think when you combine that with going deep on your business, you're right. It's, it's this big pool of context that just means the AI can think like you, which means it can sound like you. And that's probably the biggest unlock for a lot of people.

So taking a contrarian take, where is AI bad? Like, where are we going to, where should we avoid it? Where should we go to the other extreme of going analog?

I started off thinking about this with even just my social media content. There was a time there where we just started to dabble, and it's great for repurposing and taking ideas, and you still train it on your voice. There's bits that I do that are just Dave, and I'll break patterns and I'll do things that almost just the inverse of what you think you should do. Yeah, like I'll write a little post. I did the one we just went to Crowded House the other day. It was an awesome concert.

Thanks, mate. I appreciate the invite.

It's a little bit of a bucket list of mine to take Alan to. I took you to the Korn concert. Yeah, I took Alan to his first mosh pit.

Yeah, that was the most revolting experience of my life.

And then Crowded House was much more—

Crowded House was much more civilised. Yeah.

And I took— we had a photo that I got when we were in the crowd. And then I posted that on social media and I went for a really different take. I wasn't pitching anything. There was no CTA. There was no— there was just, hey, I remember when Jim Rohn said something to me listening to— I was listening to one of his tapes or whatever many moons ago, and he said, don't miss anything.

Yeah.

And he was like, go to the game, go to the show, go, enjoy because these moments are precious and you lose it. So I made a post about that, and I wrote it, and AI wasn't gonna do that type of thinking. So I don't know, I'm starting to realize there are points where the human needs to be brought in. We even notice it for a lot of our customer service. Yes, we've set up a little agent inside our HubSpot trained on our knowledge that answers questions quickly and gets people what they're looking for. But there's a point at which I want my team to step in.

Yeah.

And I want that human connection. I want Jill to send voicemail memos to new people when they onboard to say, hey, it's Jill. I noticed you signed up. I'm excited to have you here and I'm here to help out if you need anything. There's still parts like that I think we all as humans appreciate, which is connecting with other humans. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. If immediately obvious to me, I don't know if there are areas, I don't know, either more sinister or something like that where you see AI risks or where business owners and people can go wrong using AI?

AI, as much as we love it and we're geeks and we geek out all day with AI tools, it definitely has like a flattening effect in that everything starts looking and feeling the same.

Yeah.

I think you're absolutely right. Like, this is not necessarily AI, but this is an example of automation done wrong. I was on holidays in Byron Bay, I don't know, like maybe 3 or 4 years ago. Every year on my birthday, they send a text message with the exact same message and like, they don't send me anything else between that. And so, I've got this number in my, on my text messages and it's just got the same message one year apart, one year apart, one year apart. Happy birthday, Alan, whatever. So, I know it's just like a robot that's just like sending a happy, same generic happy birthday message every year on year. Forever.

So now the question is, have you gone back?

So that's the thing. A) They don't even know where I live, so they should know that I was probably on holidays and they should have probably asked when I came to the clinic and if I'm on holidays, I'm obviously not going to go all the way there to get a massage. But then also just to send the same generic thing and nothing else in between all year. It's kind of, that's a ridiculous use of automation, right? So I'm not getting a warm fuzzy feeling, say, because of that happy birthday message. Whereas if it had been sent by a human or whatever, even if they had messed up the context in that I don't live there or whatever, then that would have been much better.

So I think we, because we are so early in the AI innings and stuff is going like one thing I think about is if context is so important, and imagine now you're collecting all of the context on each of your individual clients. As the AI gets even smarter and it takes in that full context, it's going to be really interesting when it can start to tailor one-on-one marketing at scale. Whereas, because it's very hard, or had been historically, to do that stuff at scale, the way that people would do it is what you're talking about, which is automation. But Automation's dumb. Automation doesn't think. It's follow this. Oh, if that step doesn't work, it breaks. Okay. Automation doesn't work. Whereas the AI now can think and reason and go, I've got all of this context. Maybe Alan might want some tickets to a show or I don't know, and take that into account. So yeah, it'd be interesting to watch this space change because it's just moving so quickly. I'm thinking I'm going to do a little segment change here. Another segment change. One thing that we did on the last interview that we did. So you and I had one and it was a little bit of a test pilot and you did this cool thing about drunk business ideas. And I would like to make this a regular segment.

Okay, let's do it.

So I don't know if you have any drunk business ideas, these crazy ideas.

I don't drink, but I've got plenty of drunk business ideas.

And for those who who didn't hear that first episode, tell us about these drunk business ideas.

Drunk business ideas are basically business ideas that they're either genius or they're crazy, right? There's almost nothing in between. Most business ideas fall in the middle there. Yeah, they're okay, they're whatever, but these are either genius or completely crazy.

Someone might listen to this, and so these aren't implemented. These are things you would like to see.

I said I was the visionary earlier and I have 100 ideas every hour, right? So one of the ways I deal with that is I have a little note called business ideas, and I feel maybe one day I'll get to these. The reality is in 10 lifetimes, I couldn't possibly get to them, but I like keeping track of them and it makes me feel good. Maybe one day I'll do it, but the reality is I probably never will. So feel free to steal any of these.

All right. Hit us up. What's one of yours?

So one that I was thinking the other day. So we live in a little bit of a tourist area and we're locals, but we live in this tourist area. It gets flooded in summer. Tourists and people and stuff like that. And it's annoying for locals. You can't get parking or like you're in line behind 20 other people to get a cup of coffee or whatever. So, I was thinking like a locals card where like all the local shops, all the local things will prioritise locals because they're the people who are your base, who support you throughout the whole year, everything like that. And then 2 months of the year, you might get flooded with tourists and things like that. There might be a coffee line for the locals with a locals card and coffee line for everybody else, or maybe the locals get a discount or some other sort of thing. And then to take it to the next level, whoever's running this kind of locals card scheme, they've now got a database of all the locals. They've got their postcode, where possibly their mailing address, possibly their text, their phone number to text them and things like that. So that could turn into a really valuable list that you could get promos and things like that.

I think this is a genius idea. Like I could imagine. So you're imagining someone would run it at one level and then they'd get the shops to join up underneath.

Exactly.

So you'd have one person running it, which I think would be great. This work on a small scale. Sometimes things like big theme parks, they'll do a, you buy a year-long pass and you as a local, you're getting cheap. You can go lots and regularly because you're local. The same sort of thing. You could, you could even charge for this card. Like I'm imagining you could because you're going to get some discounts and things like that. We think of Costco. Yep. And Prime, Amazon Prime. Like the idea, just the model of recurring membership might not be much, could be like $10 a month, but you save a few bucks on a coffee here or there. You get a cheap lunch, you skip the line on something that you were waiting on. It's a no-brainer.

The other part of it is running like an email list for the— that's hyperlocal to— I remember I was used to read the local paper just to see what's going on. This road is closed, or this whatever mayor got elected, or whatever. Just, it's not world-shattering, but I like to know what's going on in my local community. But I haven't read that in forever because it's like a physical newspaper, so they don't even send it to your house. You've got to pick it up from the village or whatever, and So it's just a bother and I don't even bother with it. But if they had an email newsletter, I'd absolutely subscribe to it. I'd have a flick through. Oh, okay, this is happening. There's a concert happening in a couple of weeks' time. I didn't even know Crowded House was coming to our neighborhood till you invited me. I would have loved to have known about it and I would have bought tickets.

They could as well. Like I could imagine when you join up, ask you a bunch of questions to profile you, to get the context about you, to then make sure that you serve up the relevant context and offers and what shows that you might be interested in. Yeah, I think that would be a great way to do it.

Because I think it's insane that to do hyperlocal targeting, you've got to run ads with like Meta or whatever, all of that sort of thing, or the old go super analog and do a letterbox drop or something like that, which is fine. If you could combine a little bit of hyperlocal marketing with an email newsletter, local stores and shops and things like that being on board and giving locals priority, particularly in places that are beautiful places like where we live, but they tend to be tourist attractions in certain seasons.

I like this. The verdict is winner. Two thumbs up. I reckon this one's a— I might consider, I might need to sell Systemology, System Hub and go all in on this, the locals card. I like it. Yeah, let's make this a regular because I reckon we're going to hit some and I reckon someone's going to hear this.

Okay.

Run it and then they're going to send us an email and say, oh my God, I made a million bucks by listening to this show. Oh, good. With the segment change, we'll move into the last part of the show. You got my brain ticking now. I feel like let's do another one. You've got so many of these. Let's— yes.

So one of the things I'm obsessed with is pricing. Pricing. And I think it's such a big lever. And there are a few industries that do highly variable pricing. Like you think airlines, like the guy sitting next to you might've paid triple what you paid, or you might've paid triple what that guy paid. You think of Uber with surge pricing and things like that. And I'm like, not enough businesses have that. So for example, why doesn't a, why does a restaurant charge everyone the same price? Regardless of who it is, regardless of how they're staffed, regardless of what time you're buying and all of that sort of thing. For example, why don't they vary the price of the meal based on, oh, we've got heaps of fish left over. Let's make the fish dish cheaper so that we don't have so much waste. Or, oh, we've only got 2 more steaks left, so let's raise the price of that. And now with QR code ordering in most restaurants, You could easily do that. Like you could, like people scan the QR code and it brings up the menu and shows you what's available, how much it is, all of that sort of thing, rather than the paper menus and things like that, which most, which a lot of restaurants are getting rid of anyway. So you could easily have variable pricing based on demand, based on availability, based on time. Like on a Tuesday night, we're really slow. Okay. Why don't we reduce the prices on a Tuesday night or whatever, or hey, on a Saturday night where we're pumping. So. There's a surcharge in it and there's maybe surge pricing or something like that.

I love this because this idea exists in a very analog way and very backwards. Like, people do the Tight Arse Tuesdays or Half Price Wednesdays or something like that, but it's just they ballpark the idea. Well, we know we're a bit quiet on a Tuesday, so let's run this thing. Whereas now the opportunity to spot some of these old ideas that worked really well, integrate some of the new technology that we have. Imagine the first thing my mind pops to, I'm thinking about Claude Code. I'm sitting there going, how could you take an inventory of all of the stock that they've got and then create some little dynamic pricing code? Surely that's effectively what Uber's done. Uber has some algorithm in the background that's taking into account all of the requests and how many drivers they've got and what is the proximity. And okay, based on that, we're going to charge you this. Now, previously that's left to the Ubers who had deep pockets and who could develop this, whereas now we have access to Claude code. You could come up with a way where you suck all of that context in from your business, you feed it in, get it to create dynamic pricing for you, create a nice little interface over the top. And then have dynamic pricing. I could imagine that would work in just about every business. Like there are lulls.

Not, it's not only just for lulls, but I think it could extend opening out. Like for example, there's a coffee shop nearby. They used to close at 5, then they started closing at 3 and I go, how come you're closing at 3? She go, it's just not worth paying staff to, for what the amount of coffees and things we sell after 3 o'clock. So we start, and I was kind of annoyed by that because I drink decaf, so sometimes I'll have a 4 o'clock coffee and so So now I'm going to her competitor, but if they doubled the price of coffee after 3 o'clock, I'd still happily buy. And maybe it'd be worth them staying open till 5 o'clock if people were paying double after 3 o'clock.

Yeah. I reckon this is another winner, Alan. I'm going to give it two thumbs up. There's a little bit of thinking that would have to go behind making it happen, but you could, there's even like some sort of done-for-you service. Where you could calculate this, figure this out and solve that problem and then go sell that to businesses in your area. I think that would be a phenomenal idea.

Alright.

So I feel like we've touched on the drunk business ideas. We've looked a little bit at some AI news. Yeah. We've set the stage. Still experimenting with some of the different segments. I've got some ideas for segments next time and I think I promised you some drunk business ideas from me. So we'll do that on the next episode. But yeah, this is good.

Solid episode, man.

Yeah, rock solid. Looking forward to the next one.

Good on you, man.

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